Banned at Sudbury Airport

At a friend’s request, I went up to northern Ontario this weekend to look at a gold prospect, which I might chat about some time. I got to trudge through bush for a few hours – exhausting work for city folk, drove a quad around empty logging roads (at a grandfatherly pace) – my sons would be envious.

It wasn’t all that far north, but it was sure cold. We had to wear winter jackets though it was the first week of June. When you see the lurid red dots in IPCC reports showing intense warming in the far north, don’t get the idea that Siberia (or northern Canada) have become warm enough host an IPCC meeting. They haven’t. The IPCC prefers to meet in warm venues.

When I arrived in Sudbury Airport on Friday night, I logged onto the airport internet terminal (conveniently free) and tried to access Climate Audit. Access was blocked. I was –

Banned in Sudbury.

To verify that Climate Audit was specifically blocked, as opposed to blogs, I visited realclimate, which loaded without event. While I had RC online, an instructor at the local university (Laurentian) happened to walk by and congratulated me for reading such a fine website, saying he didn’t often see people in Sudbury doing so. He did not seem to regard this as evidence of either common sense or connoisseurship.

The block was via the software Softforyou, advertised as parental guidance software.

So, was the Climate Audit block a prank by a practical joking, the sky is melting, true believer, or was the block something peculiar to the Internet in Canada, perhaps an official ban to promote better climate mental health?

Maybe you were blocked because you’re upsetting some people who have vested interests in AGW? And I wonder if other sites that might offend people with certain political predispositions are also blocked?

Re: benpal (#7), who at Sudbury Airport would have an interest in “blocking” CA and why?

Contacts at Sudbury Airport Community Development Corporation (SACDC) report the Internet service at the airport and the blocking software is the responsibility of MySudbury, the organization authorized by Sudbury’s city hall to manage the facilities. The recommended contact at MySudbury was given as Jody Cameron at 705-674-4455 x4627, who was not available for immediate comment. MySudbury is responsible for managing the “image” of Sudbury in cooperation with the media such as the Sudbury Star, BBC, et al….

It’s clear that parents of minors could easily be offended by posts featuring hard-core statistical analysis, pictures of gratuitous principal components analysis mapped to uncensored charts of Antarctica, and frank and open discussions of eigenvectors, eignenvalues, statistical significance tests including open and frank discussions on the relative merits of R2 and RE metrics, en flagrant temperature and rainfall proxies including disgusting “sampling” of innocent bristlecone pines, while explicit replications of multi-proxy reconstructions of past climate could easily offend young people.

Its a wonder that the police aren’t called to shut the blog down.

And don’t get me started about the articles on doubles squash where four men get sweaty together in small enclosed spaces while being cheered on by perverts from the bleachers. That’s just the icing on the whole degenerate cake.

Steve, you’ll be happy to know that CA is open to all in China, but WUWT is blocked to the general public. Surprisingly though, the Shenzhen Met Office knew all about WUWT and CA. They get to see everything unfettered apparently.

The software company probably contains a master list that you may be able to get removed from, but it appears that they view all blogs as a threat to children:

that’s two data points against the “theory” that CA was “blocked” because of AGW “agents”…

Gary, you seem to have trouble reading carefully. I merely observed that CA was banned in Sudbury. I provided no “theory” as to why. Nor, for that matter, have I ventured my own opinions on overarching question of the sensitivity of climate to increased CO2 levels. I’ve observed that a number of prominent studies fail to accomplish their statistical objectives.

As I’ve observed on many occasions – people sometimes say to me, if the HS is “wrong”, the situation is much worse than we think, as if that repudiates analyses presented here. My answer is – if so, then we should find out if it’s wrong and govern ourselves accordingly.

Both Lucia and Jeff Id are newer blogs than CA. And while I read and recommend both blogs, I think that it’s also fair to say that CA has been more prominent than either and that one can easily picture circumstances where CA might have attracted attention that the two other blogs didn’t.

OK what’s your explanation as to why CA was blocked? Or do you think that I prematurely “jumped” to the conclusion that CA was blocked, merely the software gave a message saying that it had blocked access to the site ( and did prevent me from accessing the site.)

Maybe you think that CA was blocked because I’ve posted occasionally on doubles squash.

Re: Gary Strand (#60), Gary
You obviously have an agenda from your over sensitive reaction. If you have any complaints about Steve’s work on this wonderful site please speak up and we can debate your points. This is a blog that encourages open debate, unlike some others. Obviously I am referring to Steve’s serious work which provides an independent analysis of published climate data, not his musings on a day trip to the back woods.

are you as willing to jump to a conclusion about the “block” of CA as you are one day’s weather and the earth’s climate? Apparently so.

Which was directed at Steve (due to the conflagration about his comment on the cold day), and this:

that’s two data points against the “theory” that CA was “blocked” because of AGW “agents”…

Reading the entry, I see two observations (CA blocked, RC not blocked) but zero theories from Mr. McIntyre regarding why. Could you point to anything that Steve wrote theorizing why CA was blocked? If not, could you retract the accusation? Thanks.

Could you point to anything that Steve wrote theorizing why CA was blocked? If not, could you retract the accusation? Thanks.

I didn’t say what conclusion Steve had reached – only that he had apparently done so, as erroneously as had passed judgment on the IPCC and “intense warming in the far north” based the weather during his travel.

Steve also didn’t dissuade, or comment upon, those who had made statements about conspiracies and other silliness.

One would expect a professional scientist to be able to be able to carry out accurate quotation. Gary Strand stated:

I didn’t say that Steve proposed the conspiracy theory, I merely noted that since he visited two other “skeptic” sites (as he said) then not all “skeptic” sites were “blocked”.

If someone uses quotation marks, then he’s quoting someone. I did not say that I visited two other ‘ “skeptic” sites’. Those are Gary’s words, not mine. I said that I visited Lucia’s and Jeff Id’s, the latter being a wordpress.com site.

In addition, Gary did not merely “observe” that “not all skeptic sites were blocked”. He argued that the non-blocking of Lucia and Jeff Id demonstrated that CA was not blocked because of its critical content, when obviously it demonstrates no such thing. As I observed above, it is quite possible that CA had attracted attention while the other two sites had not. I’m afraid that Gary’s reasoning here contains a fairly elementary logical fallacy and I hope that acknowledges this.

Gary, I would also appreciate a withdrawal of your untrue allegation that comments were altered to make you look foolish.

“… a professional scientist ….” I once wrote an entire accounting package for a freight forwarder and have designed and written scores of reports and add-on modules for manufacturing accounting systems, but I would not attempt to present myself as an accountant, professional or otherwise. I did notice that you very quietly did Mr. Strand a kindness. You’re a better man than I am.

Who was the sponsor of the airport internet terminal? Could anyone have downloaded the software and installed it? I don’t doubt that CA is blocked from that terminal, but it is in a transient location where lots of people have time on their hands.

Still, its amusing that CA is dealt with in the same manner as XXX sites. It must be the size of your cajones, Steve.

Or are you as willing to jump to a conclusion about the “block” of CA as you are one day’s weather and the earth’s climate?

I didn’t “jump” to a conclusion that CA was blocked. It was blocked.

And where exactly did I “jump to a conclusion about one day’s weather and the earth’s climate”? My small point here was that warming in places like northern Ontario or Siberia is not resulting in these places becoming inhospitably hot. The only person “jumping” to unwarranted conclusions is you – you’re jumping to the conclusion that I’m jumping to conclusions. Boing, boing.

Unfortunately it’s probably true that CA is noticed. The Air Vent just isn’t that big, CA on the other hand is pretty well world famous. My little blog gets 1500 visits a day, far less than an average hour on WUWT.

While I had RC online, an instructor at the local university (Laurentian) happened to walk by and congratulated me for reading such a fine website,

I would have paid money to see him say that! I wonder if he’s in phys ed.

Re: Steve McIntyre (#17), your comments about “lurid red dots” gave you away. And if you can show me where someone says that northern Ontario or Siberia becoming “inhospitably hot”, I’d be much obliged.

I don’t lack humor – I also don’t appreciate comments being changed in order to try to make others look foolish.
Steve: No comments were changed to make others look foolish or for any other reason. This is a figment of Gary’s imagination.

Obviously feelings are running high on the alarmists side. Maybe the cold weather around the world is making them jumpy. Or maybe their predictions all failing is doing it. I don’t why know for sure. But I can see alarmists are more touchy.

There’s no confusion. We just might not want to accept what you would like us to accept about these 2 words–this appears as confusion to you.
At what point will all this record cold and snow stop being ‘weather’ Gary?

Verrrrrrrrrry funny McIntyre. Where does a company named “softforyou” get off banning sites?
Is this some kind of perverted double entendre you made up just to trap the likes of
Gary? A company named Softforyou? get serious. you made this whole thing up. You don’t fool me!

We had a simular thing happen with the phone company during the abortive debate between Tim Ball and Andrew Dessler. The phone company wouldn’t put through Dr. Ball’s call to the blog radio station in the states.
Doc Dessler ended up having the field to himself. That was a painful moment.

Have you contacted Softforyou to see if CA is on some master list? Many of these parental controls software apps give parents the ability to report objectionable websites to the software maker for inclusion in a master list that all software users get as a default set. I would not be surprised, given the sort of dirty tricks we’ve seen from the alarmists in data disclosure, etc, if one of them filed a false report with Softforyou.com against CA.

Steve, you are joking, aren’t you? Who, in a serious moment, would want to open Climate Audit while in Sudbury? There are much better things to read on the Net.

“Softforyou” reminds me of the brand name for a toilet paper. Here in Australia (where our sense of humour is strange, idem..) we had a toilet paper named “Dawn” until it became widely known as an acronym for “Does away with newspaper”. We also had bras named “Hestia”, for “Holds every sized t.. in Australia”. And to complete the trifecta, Australia uses toilet paper at over 1600 kph, wll above the speed of sound at sea level.

Enough of this classy humour. By coincidence, a couple of days ago my eBay site was hacked and some person had me selling a Subaru Impreza WRX motor car, which I think is a little rice burner. The hack is very professional and we have not sorted it after several days of expert work. I mention this in case it is infectious and I have passed on an unwanted artefact in past emails or posts. Part of the symptom could be that the use meter shows 40% CPU use in one core while nothing much is going on. Windows XP task manager.

As one who has a company in China and spends about half my time here, I can testify that about 40% of the “AGW Skeptical” blog sites I regularly peruse are blocked here in China. this includes WUWT & The Air Vent among others. CA is not blocked :)

With regard to China, the blocking is the blog hosting sites. Both Blogspot and WordPress are blocked, perhaps because peasant-folk can post opinions through those blogs. There are some blogspot/wordpress non-climate(!) blogs that I read and they were not accessible either.

They also shut down Twitter for the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen(sp?) Square.

WordPress may well be universally blocked but there are many other sites also blocked in China such as Lubos

This may be related : the movie with Harrison Ford, “The Fugitive” was not allowed to be shown in China. Apparently a lone, innocent man who finds ways to escape the authorities may have made the Chinese government uncomfortable. Supposedly the Chinese government has turned over a new leaf since then and is not so uncomfortable with these sort of things. With the blocking of many blogs maybe they have turned the leaf only half over.

I’d suspect that the Chinese bans are more to do with a great number of skeptic sites being frequented and sometimes run by people who like to air their complaints about socialism in general and China in particular.

Sometimes it’s as simple as an ideologue employee looking after the list slipping it on, & it gets fixed up pretty quickly after enquiries. snip . Filter hawkers are by & large snake oil salesmen. BTW the Rudd Government in Australia is currently trying to introduce mandatory Chinese-style internet censorship.

Labels tend to box people into a certain position. If the Antarctic paper was good, I would have a different reader base now.

Just for the record, the only things I’m skeptical of are about a dozen of the many climatology papers I’ve now read, overbroad AGW claims, politicians, consensus, and well paid weathermen who claim certainty about the climate future.

I wonder if WUWT being blocked in China has anything to do with his coverage of the controversy surrounding the Chinese temperature recording stations, remember the “high quality” data and unmoved site claims that were used to dispel Urban Heat Island effects?

Re 74. It’s actually funnier if we just let gary beclown himself some more without setting him straight or giving him the opportunity to set himself straight.

Lucia and I once discussed a particularly neat trick wherein a blog operator could allow a selected individual to
view a different version of the blog than everyone else. basically his comments were visible to him but invisible to everyone else. Shrouds for Trolls. hehe. Do you think that gary is even aware that the rest of us see comments that he does not?

With Transport Canada having a strangle hold on the airports, I would direct my questions to them first.

As for Gary, you can expect that a “withdrawal” of Gary’s remarks will follow closely on the heels of Real Climate, Climate Progress and David Suzuki declaring that there is no such thing as AGW, oops, I meant Anthropogenic Climate Change of course (can we say ACC, or will the Atlantic Coast Conference sue?).

Don’t hold your breath in other words, oh and Gary does not appear to need any assistance in order to “look foolish”, he’s doing fine all by himself.

Steve M.,
Back when TCO’s foul rantings were piped unfiltered over the wire to me via akgregator I wouldn’t have let any youngster near. Does such live on in your archives? Humorous substitution of foul with fair words and phrases would preserve what might be useful and help you get past filters.

Yeah, I don’t like to rewrite “history”, but what are you going to do? Create a CENSORED directory?

Usually, internet filtering software companies have ways that you can challenge a decision to block a site. I think you first need to establish that CA is on their blocked site list. (Some software packages allow local admins to add sites to a local list, so its also possible that Sudbury Airport added you to their local list). If Softforyou has CA on their list, I think you can contact them as ask them to remove you from the list.

As always, I’m left wondering if some people have any idea how their childish rantings appear to others. I can assure you, looking through this thread there is exactly one standout poster, and my first thought was that someone might need their meds adjusted.

Then I thought maybe CA is blocked because of the naked trolling going on here.

I wonder if CA was blocked as part of a default blacklist in the “Parental Control” software?

These applications usually come with a default black list as well as regular updates from the web. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there is someone who owns this software reporting your site as inappropriate just to get it added to the black list for all users of the software.

# How do I prevent a Web Site from being blocked by CyberSieve?
If CyberSieve blocks a certain Web site for some reason but you consider the site viewable, you can add this web site to the “Trusted Web Sites” list to prevent it from being blocked by CyberSieve.

Open the CyberSieve Control Panel, click on Settings and select “Web Sites” item. Then push the “Trusted Web Sites List” link, select the user’s group, mark the “Enable Trusted Web Sites List” checkbox, and push the “Add” button. Enter the trusted web site name, choose the user’s group, and push the “OK” button.

Use “Add”, “Edit” and “Delete” buttons located on the bottom of the window to edit the list.

First, that was by no means a veiled threat or that I was going to pen a letter – sorry if it came off that way. But for better or worse, you’re representing the institution – sorry, but that’s the way it goes.

Regardless of that, do you still stand behind this question / statement?

are you as willing to jump to a conclusion about the “block” of CA as you are one day’s weather and the earth’s climate? Apparently so.

I use only my first name, btw, precisely because what I say *could* reflect on my employer, disclaimer or not. The private sector has a much stricter practice dealing with employees who bring discredit on them via postings and allegations like this. I’m not making a judgement on whether that’s a good or bad thing – again – that’s just the way it goes.

Re:104 – I would say that he observed that CA was blocked RC was not, but didn’t theorize why, and is not responsible for moderating all posters comments that surmise reasons out of the blog. Having been a consistent reader of several blogs on both sides of the AGW, I can tell you (if only anecdotally) which side over-moderates dissenting posts.

Anyway, this is basically a fun/funny thread, as opposed to a lot of the threads which dig into the details of models, reconstructions, and statistics used therein. I’d be interested to hear your take on the reconstruction of Steig et al 09. Lets get back to the numbers and may the most robust win :)

Steve also didn’t dissuade, or comment upon, those who had made statements about conspiracies and other silliness.

And thank god he doesn’t. This is about the only large blog you can have a real discussion on. I can’t believe you threw the whole group under the bus in #93. Another good technical believer kicking around is appreciated by many of us. However, I didn’t know who you are so from your first comments I thought you were just another uninformed troll.

Why did you pick the fun thread to intentionally start a battle? In blogland it’s helpful to have a lighter thread once in a while to let some steam off. A lot of people read here and don’t add to the math posts. RC does it as a matter of standard practice. In the meantime, there are a lot of technical details to muddle around with and if you find what’s wrong you could really grind our collective noses in the hot AGW sand. We’d all learn something.
————–
OT: I’m still irked about Gavin’s unreasonable reply and deletion of my RC comment on my latest post.

The overall tenor of CA has turned out to be about what I was expecting

So you came in with preconcieved ideas and you see through those prejudiced colored glasses.
If you would sit back and look at this thread from top to bottom and give everything you read a fair judgement you may see differently.

Re: Feedback (#105), he didn’t dissuade or comment upon some of your statements and other silliness, either. So what?

You’ve made a mountain out of a molehill. There are plenty of informative and thorough discussions on other threads here. Just avoid the humorous observational ones like this one, and you’ll be just fine.

Earlier today I downloaded a trial version of iProtectYou from SoftForYou.com. When I tried to access Climateaudit.org, I was blocked and received the following message.

WattsUpWithThat and Lucia’s Blackboard were not blocked.

I installed the software with the default configuration (and I’ve since removed it, of course).

Note that the message refers to this post (“Banned in Sudbury”, p=6217). It may be that CA is somehow inadvertantly placing banned words or phrases in its html code, or that there was something in the comments. It might be worthwhile communicating with the software company to find out exactly what triggered the screen in this case.

It does seem that the problem has nothing to do with any deliberate targeting of CA as far as I can see.

Re: Deep Climate (#110), That’s good info. Steve – you may want to check to make sure that someone hasn’t added foul scripts or meta-tags. Lucia had that happen recently on her blog. If that’s the case, then a cleanup and an email to SoftForYou might do the trick.

Looks like there’s a steaming pile somewhere on this site that’s turning the nose of the filter.

Gary Strand..

LOL @ U, buddy. Seriously, Steve has made no references to any kind of conspiracy, I threw that out there earlier in the thread because it seemed funny. I’m sure it was just a mere coincidence this has happened, but maybe not, and it was up to the readers to make their own conclusion. All he did was just articulate his “investigation” or “experiment” and instead of drawing any conclusions, allowed the user to make up their own mind. It appears that others with computer specialties (an obvious collaborative, and open sharing system) discovered the true nature of the issue, making no pre-conceived notions, obviously believing that Steve wasn’t leading their views. The exercise shows how “bias” is in the process, you fell right into it, and are now flailing away trying to pin it on Steve, attacking his motives without once looking at yourself. Climate Science at its best.

Steve Mc, I think your can solve this if you go back and delete all of the posts made my “TCO” and maybe a couple of other posters that no longer frequent here.

TCO’s cuss quotient, as we all know, is very high, and I think there are a few F-bombs left on the site from his many colorful comments in the past. Serach engines don’t pay attention to age of posts/comments, they only care if key words exist somewhere in the site HTML stream.

It would be an easy chore to just use George Carlin’s “7 dirty words you can’t say on TV” and search comments, deleting those that pop up.

To be fair, I think the entry itself makes it clear the site was blocked before this thread existed. I’m not sure what the original cause was, but I can be certain that it wasn’t the contents of this thread, or it wouldn’t exist.

/unless we’re all living in a recursive black hole of yester
//!!!!hhhhhhggggggaaaaaaaa

Apropos of nothing and for no good reason, I present a favorite song of mine, which helps (me) to put these kinds of things into perspective. Bless the ANZACs, the Canadians, the dogfaces, the leathernecks, the squids, the wingnuts, and all I’ve forgotten – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG48Ftsr3OI – Steve, please snip the entire paragragh if this is too far off track from a funny little anecdote about the airport in Sudbury. Asa retired Army officer and contributer to far too many sites, the song provides a great context to debates such as this.

To be fair, I think the entry itself makes it clear the site was blocked before this thread existed. I’m not sure what the original cause was, but I can be certain that it wasn’t the contents of this thread, or it wouldn’t exist.

It’s most likely something that is present in every post, and the first post checked is flagged. That suggests repeated content, perhaps in an infected script.

Gary, you have indeed observed the general tenor of CA: Steve M’s careful equivocating coupled with insinuation, selective post-hoc unlabeled editing, conspiracy theories in the comments feeding off the unfortunate, accidental and oh so unintentional insinuation, oh, and paranoia despite all manner of possible, reasonable and logical explanations.

How convenient Gary. You come in here and pick a fight over virtually nothing, and then you complain about the tenor. If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, then you are no better than Plimple. Then again, maybe you don’t see what’s wrong with his posting either. It’s all so sad.

It would be interesting if readers would try to access CA, RC, WUWT, tAV, tBB, Tamino, etc, at public libraries or on their own computers with parental controls in effect to see what is or isn’t blocked by which softwares. And why.

One thing, it always amuses me when posters to any blog get self righteous about everyone else posting under a pseudonym, whereas they use their “real” name. Another tactic to attempt to derail discussion, as if the fact they chose a nom de web that looks like a “real” name makes it so (or matters, read the argument/thought, not the name of the book). I could call myself Javier Acevedo, and be posting under a “real” name. Wouldn’t be my real name, or alter the content of my post.

Wait, I know, I’m John Lee from China, that clears it up. It’s not like there are any other people out there named Lee.

One thing, it always amuses me when posters to any blog get self righteous about everyone else posting under a pseudonym, whereas they use their “real” name. Another tactic to attempt to derail discussion,[…]

Hiding behind a pseudonym causes some degree of damage to the poster’s credibility, IMHO. Using another person’s name also implies something to hide.

To you, perhaps, not so much to others. There are ample reasons, from shielding your employer from any implied bad juju, to maintaining a consistent online persona (I’ve posted under the same handle for almost two decades now counting Usenet). If you actively look for reasons to discredit and ignore a posters comments, you can find them, from the use of nom de webs to spelling/grammatical errors. It is still, IMO, a lazy way out of having to pay attention and acknowledge the contents of a post/argument/discussion.

I also tend to notice this attitude mostly in people who are relatively new to such online discussions, and those who are older and come to this later in life. In people who survived the epic flame wars of early Usenet/ARPAnet, not so much.

Also, given the fact that many employers now Google a prospective employees name, and never knowing what might set off their hot buttons (a phrase, an ideology, often a political affiliation these days), many are justifiably hesitant to post under anything but a nom de web. Also considering the number of raging lunatics out there (unless you’ve been the victim of an online stalker you will not understand), prudence is a virtue.

It is still, IMO, a lazy way out of having to pay attention and acknowledge the contents of a post/argument/discussion.

I also tend to notice this attitude mostly in people who are relatively new to such online discussions, and those who are older and come to this later in life.

I tend to notice it more with people that are looking for an excuse to avoid making real arguments because, deep down, they realize they don’t have one. Credibility, i.e., appeal to authority, is a much bigger issue with alarmists supporting their cause than any others involved in the debate. As you noted, it gives them an out so they don’t have to address the meat of the argument. Cowardice is a better description.

Re: Severian (#126),
Hiding behind a pseudonym causes some degree of damage to the poster’s credibility, IMHO. Using another person’s name also implies something to hide.

Given your conclusion “a pseudonym causes some degree of damage to the poster’s credibility,” would it be accurate to suspect your employee performance evaluations of the subordinates you supervise more often than not must reflect a lesser performance rating as a consequence of the “damage to the poster’s credibility” and how that damaged credibility may reflect upon the credibility and professionalism of the supervisor’s employer?

What do you think the impact may be upon the “image” of Sudbury’s municipal government as managed by MySudbury when Internet access to Climate Audit and comparable Websites are or are not blocked, deliberately or not deliberately?

I have emailed softforyou support about this erroneous listing and requested they inspect CA and remove it from their default banlist.

Meanwhile, I’ve also had a convo with a friend in the British Ministry of Defence about the situation with Hadley, Dr. Jones, and the Met Office, and suggested it would be in their interest to kick Jones’ behind into gear and release the data or they’re likely to see chapter two in FOI scandals. They agreed that “Because Dr. Jones Says So” isn’t a recognized security classification at MoD.

Steve Mc, I think your can solve this if you go back and delete all of the posts made my “TCO” and maybe a couple of other posters that no longer frequent here.

Not sure about that – the message clearly indicated this thread. Ryan O might be on to something – there may be infected scripts.

My guess is that the reference to thread #6217 just meant that this was the lastest thread on the objectionable site. This thread obviously didn’t yet exist when Steve was in Sudbury.

I wouldn’t want the many TCO comments to be deleted out of hand. He (or she) provides an education about the attitude of many warmers. I prefer Anthony’s second suggestion, to just screen for Carlin’s 7 magic words. It wouldn’t hurt to also scan TCO’s posts, per Anthony’s observation, to see if perhaps Carlin missed a few.

Re: Gary Strand (#132), you mean this website? Nice list of publications, having published with card carrying members of the Hockey Team, if you aren’t a climatologist, you are an IT person who plays a climatologist on the intertubes.

Re: Gary Strand (#132), you mean this website? Nice list of publications, having published with card carrying members of the Hockey Team, if you aren’t a climatologist, you are an IT person who plays a climatologist on the intertubes.

I’m not clear what your point is. GS is apparently a software engineer who collaborates with climatologists on various climate modelling projects.

Re: Deep Climate (#147), he denied being a climatologist in a prior post and commented about someone visiting his website, so i went looking.. Was just pointing out that he probably has a longer record publishing on climate studies (with Hockey Team members) than our esteemed CA blogger and many climatologists I know. If we were to consider his copublishing with Hockey Team members to be a condition of Team membership, given how much we know they tend to publish together, reference each other, and peer review each others papers, then Gary here is on the Team.

Was just pointing out that he probably has a longer record publishing on climate studies (with Hockey Team members) than our esteemed CA blogger and many climatologists I know. If we were to consider his copublishing with Hockey Team members to be a condition of Team membership, given how much we know they tend to publish together, reference each other, and peer review each others papers, then Gary here is on the Team.

How do you figure? One paper in which Santer is 3rd author (I happened to be last) is awfully thin evidence of “Team” membership. Besides, while I realize the “Team” is considered bad mojo around here, I don’t consider them that way.

Gary: glad to see you are still here and posting under your own identity. There are lots of Gary Strands on the web including a bass fisherman and a guy who runs safaris in Africa. Very early on Steve M. snipped a comment with your full address. That is the mark of a gentleman. Whether you consider yourself a climate scientist or not, you have a lot to contribute to our discussion, even if you won’t come over to the dark side. Not all of us are knuckle draggers and we’d appreciate thoughtful commentary.

Much as I was frustrated by earlier “vigorous discussion” that occasionally bordered on barroom brawls, I am reluctant to suggest completely deleting posts that contained language we’d no longer accept.

I wonder if there is a way to convert the Carlin Seven into appropriately-substituted “bleep” code?

Blog policies have evolved. In the early days, as an over-reaction to Real Climate censorship of me and others, I did not censor posts. I’ve had to modify this policy over time. The largest percentage of my snips and deletes are to thin out “piling on” posts by supporters. I seldom touch posts by critics.

The foulest posts – much fouler than TCO at his worst – were by a computer software engineer associated with climate modeling, who posted here under his own name. I left them up partly to avoid accusations of censorship and partly because he discredited himself. However, I wouldn’t do the same thing these days.

RE Deep Climate #143,
I tried clicking VIEW/SOURCE to see the HTML for this page, and then searched for what I imagined the Carlin 7 to be. The worst I turned up was p*rn in #47.
Perhaps others are more creative than myself.

You would need to look at all referenced scripts (including cascading calls), not just the html code itself. I checked one script and didn’t find anything, but don’t have time or interest to do an exhaustive search. It would be easier for the admin to do a global search of the directories for possible banned words or phrases in the various config files/scripts. Even better … see if SoftForYou.com will help diagnose. One could also download the software and point it at several individual posts (not the home page) and see what happens.

It might be language in comments, but I think that’s less likely. I’ve noticed occasional offensive language at other blogs and they seemed OK. (Personally, I even edit “cr*p” but that’s just me).

I seem to recall that Lucia (at Blackboard) had a problem with infected scripts – that might be worth checking out.

Filtering software sometimes seems to work in mysterious ways but only because their algorithm for determining banned sites is not published or described (hmmmm … why does that sound familiar?)

It seems likely that for unknown reasons SoftForYou has placed CA in the filter list (see test done by a reader, above, using the demo version of the filter). The filter lists typically have override capabilities at the local level – to make changes from the current default settings. Many – may be most organizations just use the default settings.

Our local school district has similar problems (and necessarily has to block a ton of stuff unfortunately – I’m on a citizen volunteer on their tech committee and have learned about some of the “inside stories”). All “free” hosting sites are blocked because of the difficulty in controlling the content; a lot of blogs are also blocked. All video sites are blocked because students were consuming much of the district’s bandwidth (and they’ve got a lot of bandwidth!)

Filters tend to have a lot of problems – but I understand now why they are needed, especially in the school setting. If there is a problem, its best to notify the local system administrator and also the software vendor.

I doubt there is anything nefarious going on – I had interpreted Steve’s original post as a bit of humor of about being banned. (And yes, my old hobby blog was banned by the local school district too for a long time : ))

This is a blog on the Ward Churchill misconduct
hearings. About the worst thing the Strand wrote
was that the UC should never have hired Churchill
in the first place. This seems eminently rational
and I would not class it as an ad-hominem attack!

A number of participants on that blog had no
reluctance in spewing vitriol. Strand was not
one of them.

Once again I’m nonplussed at the snipping policies. Why snip off a good, clean joke and leave up all the I said/ you said/ he said bilge? Might as well have snipped the whole comment now that it’s disjointed. Might as well snip the whole darn thread for that matter.

Steve: I don’t guarantee 100% consistency in thread mangement. I have other things to do. I prefer that readers ask me to delete something that breaches blog policies than to engage in food fights.

Our Gav is famous, he is on two web sites at the same time. On one I don’t have a problem making domestic arrangements and also trying to keep in control his ego. On the other site well I just can’t make myself heard unless I tell him he’s a lovely boy and very clever.

I am not very good at statistics so I wondered whether the clever people on this site could help :-

Site One: RC Number of posts: 144 Total: Those Uncritical 142 Those Critical 2

Site Two: Guardian Environment Number of posts:85 Total : Those Uncritical 40 Those Critical 45

Can someone use some statistical analysis to advise on the balance of probability which site may be censoring.

So, you’ve stumbled on our little plan! Sorry, Mr. McIntyre, but now that you have unearthed our internet-site-blocking conspiracy, we have no choice but to send the Men In Black after you. I hope you enjoy yourself in our little UN detention camp. Ha! Ha! Ha!

-The AGW Masters

Steve: The word “conspiracy” is not one that I use and one whose use I strongly discourage.

Our Blocked List does not include ClimateAudit.com.
Our program (iProtectYou or CyberSieve) did not block ClimateAudit.com.Someone jokingly put bad words in an article on the ClimateAudit.com
and this page has been blocked. Our program worked correctly. Now there are no such words in the article and the program is not blocking the site.

In any case if CyberSieve blocks a certain Web site for some reason
but you consider the site viewable, you can add this web site to the
“Trusted Web Sites” list to prevent it from being blocked by CyberSieve.
Open the CyberSieve Control Panel, click on Settings and select “Web
Sites” item. Then push the “Trusted Web Sites List” link, select the
user’s group, mark the “Enable Trusted Web Sites List” checkbox, and
push the “Add” button. Enter the trusted web site name
(*.climateaudit.org), choose the user’s group, and push the “OK” button.
Use “Add”, “Edit” and “Delete” buttons located on the bottom of the
window to edit the list. . . .
Sincerely yours,
Alex
SoftForYou support

Gary apparently came here with preconceptions and a chip on his shoulder.

There is no need for anyone to respond in kind. He is clearly not a troll, he apologized for a heat of the moment error. He should be treated with courtesy and with respect for his properly formulated opinions – just as we would like to be treated at RC.

BTW (if anyony cares), my real name is John Linard. I am a civil engineer, born in Australia , living in Canada) I have been involved in organized crime (designing and building dams and hydropower plants) for 45 years. Working in this field, I have collaborated with some of the most reknowned earth scientist (of all disciplines) ans have picked up a fair bit of all of them myself.

After all these years and all this experience (in 30 countries and every continent except Antarctica), all I can say re my own field of knowledge is that I still don’t know what I don’t know, but that what I don’t know is probably astronomically greater than what I do know.

As a lurking observer of this thread since it began, I’d like to sum thins up a bit a hopefully calm things down.

To those of us who have been longtime followers of CA and are used to Steve M.’s writing see the implied eye rolling humor in his post. Add to it the obviously (to the long time casual observer) tongue-in-cheek replies (i.e. #1, #2, & #4). However, the uninitiated could interpret Steve’s post as “I’m blocked and RC’s not! Conspiracy…” And that’s where Gary Strand enters the picture at #6.

IMNSHO, Mr. Strand is a victim of unwittingly inserting himself into what we would call an inside joke. But give him credit, he’s hung in there and apologized when necessary (#101). And honestly he has behaved himself reasonably well (he’s not a Troll) in what his friends and colleagues would consider enemy territory. After all, he personally knows and works with “The Team.” This association pays his bills, keeps a roof over his family’s head, and has a vested interest in their success. Note, this is NOT a bad thing, but a very human one. However, his association brings with it certain biases as noted in #94

The overall tenor of CA has turned out to be about what I was expecting.

In light of this obvious preconception Gary was all too willing to see CA humor as paranoia and went into attack mode with his very first post, the aforementioned #6:

What other sites did you check? Or are you as willing to jump to a conclusion about the “block” of CA as you are one day’s weather and the earth’s climate? Apparently so.

It takes a lot of guts to jump out in the open firing blindly in Indian country, but as as a good friend would say about his Navy Cross, “not a lotta brains…” But give the Gary credit, he’s stuck around which is more than we can say about many of his colleagues.

This is not to say we CA reader haven’t brought our own preconceived notions to the fray. Yes, there are very legitimate gripes with “The Team” that have a long documented history which adds an emotional frustration to the mix. Which has led to guilt by association by some commenters, however, as of 10:56 pm last night, Gary is still here. He’s got guts.

One of the biggest frustration is “the Team’s” unwillingness to expose their work to critical review. But here, with Gary, there is an opportunity to engage constructively on the topics that concern us all. We can chase him away and puff out our chests pridefully, or we can engage in real scientific discussions on the data and methods.

I would like to propose a truce and start over with Gary. That he engage thoughtfully with those who have real questions and that we reply thoughtfully as well. Terry is correct:

the current line of posts don’t further our collective knowledge, lets engage in a productive conversation…

I second that wise observation. You’ve shown us your retorical guts, Gary, but we’re geeks too we really want to see your intellect.

With best regards,
Sparkey

In God we trust, all others bring data
Sparkey’s corollary, “simulations are not data…”

I hadn’t been blocked before. I don’t know why I was blocked and didn’t speculate on it. It could be something in the software, but it;s also possible that some individual caused it to be blacklisted. I don’t know. I merely noted that I was blocked.

Readers who are getting all excited about this – including Gary Strand – seem to overlook what I thought was amusing about the incident: that I checked realclimate to see if other climate blogs were blocked and in the 5 seconds that I had RC was up, a professor walked by and “caught” me reading RC. We chatted briefly. I have a nephew at Laurentian taking geology – he loves geology.

That’s highly unlikely based on available evidence. The message I got was unambiguous: “Data transmission was interrupted due to an inappropriate word or phrase.”

Now of course this particular post was not the problem when Steve accessed CA in Sudbury, but think about it: if CA were in a database of blocked websites, there would be no need to scan the post at all – the software would just block the website right away.

Today, I reenabled the iProtectYou filter and played with parameters.

CA is no longer blocked, but the Sudbury post still is. Presumably this is because it is no longer the lead article at CA, and so now the home page is not blocked. So far I haven’t found any other blocked posts, but I only tried a couple and I don’t know which was the lead post when Steve logged in Sudbury.

I have also been able to find the triggering phrase. iPY has an option to display content with *** in the offending phrase, instead of blocking it. (The software issued all kinds of dire warnings when I selected this option).

I’m thinking it is because RealClimate is for children (or those with child-like minds), while Climate Audit is *** ******.

That’s right – the offending phrase (or at least first one found) was/is “for adults”! Interestingly, the word “porn” in comment 47 was not masked out (but that could be a bug in the software).

The unassailable conclusion:
CA is not in the SoftForYou “block” database. And, obviously, the further speculation that it is “possible some individual caused it to be blacklisted” is wholly unfounded.

This is good news – no need to try and get CA off of some blacklist. And also it seems that there is no hidden malicious content that needs to be cleaned out.

Steve, if you want to confirm which post was in the “lead” when you were in Sudbury airport, I’ll check it out (just to try and resolve the last remaining question).

I have also been able to find the triggering phrase. iPY has an option to display content with *** in the offending phrase, instead of blocking it. (The software issued all kinds of dire warnings when I selected this option).

Can you send this to me by email as I try to immediately delete any Carlin 7 occurrences if they occur.

Steve,
From what I’ve seen so far, it’s only the first post that gets scanned in its entirety. That is, CA was blocked for me when the Sudbury post was at the top, but not later. Then only the Sudbury post itself was blocked, not the home page (where it was now second).

The GISS post does not get blocked, so right now I have no explanation for what happened in Sudbury. It could be that:
a) Something changed (e.g. a comment got changed or snipped) or
b) There was something else on the home page (e.g. a recent comment on another thread)

It’s also possible that the filter at Sudbury airport was set tighter than the default (which would increase the “false positives”). I haven’t tried that, but there are a lot of parameters to play with.

Honestly I wouldn’t worry too much about the old stuff that may have gotten through or is hanging around in a cache. I just don’t see that that would be enough to get you on a blacklist. SoftForYou.com says you’re not on the blacklist and I also didn’t see any indication of that.

It looks like one of those odd intermittent issues, and as long as you are getting rid of the Carlin 7, I’m sure this is a rare occurrence. I would also there’s not much to be done – who could know that “for adults” could trigger a parental software block! Obviously if you could automate the removal/neutralization of Carlin 7, that would help. Not sure how to do that, though …

I’m not sure what you wanted me to email you. I can send you the iProtectYou trial (executable installer), but you can download it just as easily from SoftForYou.com. But prepared to hassle a little bit getting it to work with your firewall/virus software. Let me know … (I’ll be offlime tomorrow however).

Could there have been a link to the following post up on Friday?Santer and the “Power of P**p”.
I think “p**p” a strong candidate for triggering the filtering software, Deep climate could make sure. However, that post and its comments are old enough to not have been on Friday’s main page.

…amusing about the incident: that I checked realclimate to see if other climate blogs were blocked and in the 5 seconds that I had RC was up, a professor walked by and “caught” me reading RC. We chatted briefly.

That he didn’t know who he was talking to may have been the most amusing part.

I wrote to SFY yesterday, and received their reply this morning:
———-
Dear XXXXXXXXX,

Our Blocked List does not include ClimateAudit.com.
Our program (iProtectYou or CyberSieve) did not block ClimateAudit.com.
Someone jokingly put bad words in an article on the ClimateAudit.com
and this page has been blocked. Our program worked correctly.
Now there are no such words in the article and the program is not blocking the site.

In any case if CyberSieve blocks a certain Web site for some reason
but you consider the site viewable, you can add this web site to the
“Trusted Web Sites” list to prevent it from being blocked by CyberSieve.
Open the CyberSieve Control Panel, click on Settings and select “Web
Sites” item. Then push the “Trusted Web Sites List” link, select the
user’s group, mark the “Enable Trusted Web Sites List” checkbox, and
push the “Add” button. Enter the trusted web site name
(*.climateaudit.org), choose the user’s group, and push the “OK” button.
Use “Add”, “Edit” and “Delete” buttons located on the bottom of the
window to edit the list.

1. Neither Lucia and Jeff Id were blocked
2. Softforyou blocks CA in the standard configuration
3. TCO used a lot of Carlin’s 7 throughout the blog (mended by now?)

I think, this would benefit those readers who do not read the complete comments section. I _suspect_ the reason for the block is benign, i.e. the site is blocked for the use of Carlin’s 7, which is reason enough for a lot of filtering software to block a site. A quick google for the most infamous one shows that by now these seem to have been replaced by starred versions. Given #2 and #3 above, I consider a targeted blocking of CA to be unlikely. For example, I expect ornithological sites to have a hard time, when they cover such controversial subjects as paridae or sula nebouxii, too. There are also a lot of German and Austrian place names ending in “-ing” which will be blocked by English language filtering software.

– back to lurking –

Steve: to my knowledge there are no occurrences of the Carlin 7 on the blog. I immediately deleted this sort of stuff at the time.

Sure, whatever. Nice points, Sparkey and PhilH. ;) People like Gary need for debates to center on these things. They deflect from real issues since they seem otherwise incapable of dealing with real issues.

Gary may be from the “enemy camp” but there is absolutely no call to go “RC” on him. His comment 188 was perfectly correct. Let me illustrate with a topic that has been in the forefront of the attention of many of us: The Steig paper.

All of the experts and authorities prior to 2008 said that the Antarctic was not warming. If someone were to proclaim “the Antarctic is warming” without supplying data, we would refer him back to the experts and authorities that contradicted him. That is an appeal to credibility.

Dr. Steig published a paper saying that the Antarctic was warming and provided a certain amount of evidence that this was true. To have dismissed his paper as hogwash because no one else agreed with him would have been an appeal to authority: you are wrong because no one else agrees with you. Even worse, a large number of media outlets picked up Dr. Steig’s paper and trumpeted as “true” because he was a climate scientist and this was the latest research. Another appeal to authority and totaling disregarding evidence of “credibility”.

Steve M., the two Jeffs and Ryan O. took up the challenge of Dr. Steig’s paper and attempted to replicate it. As Jeff Id likes to point out, his blog might have an entirely different readership if the results of that analysis had been different. On the basis of their understanding of the mathematics and measurement methodologies involved, Dr. Steig’s conclusions were not supportable.

To put it in a different way, the contradiction of Dr. Steig’s claims is credible in part because it supports other long established and documented claims. If Ryan O. and the Jeffs had concluded that Dr. Steig’s methods and conclusions were valid, it would have enhanced the credibility of Dr. Steig’s paper. As it stands, neither approach is a “knock-out punch”. To cite one or the other as proof-positive of a position is an appeal to authority that is unjustified. It is evidence. Period.

Now, please keep in mind where Gary Strang is coming from. He is, by his own description, a software engineer and not a climate scientist. Oddly enough, that is a title/status that I can claim for myself, sometimes, on a good day, when the sun shines and the wind is out of the south…. what we do, for the cybernetically challenged, is develop a functional specification from some other expert in his field (when such and such happens, I want this valve to open…) and turn it into a set of computer instructions. Very often, we have to go back to our experts and say something like “uhh, in the actual data I’ve got four separate values, not two. How do you want me to handle values three and four?” He may reply, “treat it as CO2″. My job is not to argue that it should not be treated as CO2…. if you get my point. We design the systems or the models as our clients/users tell us they should be designed. Along the way most of us develop a fondness and defensiveness about our creations and can tell you a lot about them….

If Gary Strang is willing to talk about his work and not cast aspersions, I for one, am all ears… (no, I am not a Vulcan!)

I should add, btw, or at least, state that more appropriately, credibility arguments are ad hominem arguments. Though, annoyingly, the ad hominem label is misused by skeptics and alarmists alike (insults are not “ad homs” by themselves).

Steve,
just for info: I had searched for “f**k” (in the fully spelled version) and got hits for posts #239, #370, #635, #669 and #3058 (link goes to google, link wrapped in tinyurl to avoid posting the Carlin word here). The pages on CA have been sanitized (so there should be no longer a problem), but the pages cached by google contained and still contain the original Carlin word.

I checked the Carlin words, most of which weren’t present. There were a number of s**t that I missed and I snipped most of them. It was late when I did this and I wasn’t being hugely attentive. My recollection was that there hadn’t been any f*** but I guess there must have been a few f*** left over from TCO that I had missed earlier and picked up after the matter had been raised.

Re: Thomas J. Arnold. (#199), Thailand does not block WUWT or CA. I have lived in Patong for nearly three years and have had no problem using two different ISPs. YouTube may still be blocked by one ISP but it was established that it is not a government directive.

Steve: I observed above that I had encountered no access problem in Thailand.

The google cache pages were time stamped June 2 to June 5, 2009, i.e. before and on last Friday.

@Deep Climate
“GISS Gridded and Zonal Data” is still on the main page and does not seem to trigger the filter as you reported. Some of the other posts have been pushed off the main page by now, so maybe you find something on the second page of CA.

Pete, thanks for clarifying that. I was confident that I didn’t see any f*** when I used the administrator search but the Google cache evidence trumped my memory. I’m relieved that my memory hasn’t evaporated totally. I cleaned up some more s*** and it;s now down a lot. I guess I should have been more ruthless in deleting but, at the time, the recipients invariably equated such enforcement of civility with realclimate censorship.

If Softforyou was blocking climateaudit.* because of the spamming activities of climateaudit.com (which we were warned by Revkin of the NYT had spyware/malware attached to it a couple of years ago) then that might explain a lot. Obviously neither Steve nor I have any control over climateaudit.com, and have no claim because “Climate Audit” isn’t a registered trademark.

I thought you might. If you want to chat off-line, Steve M. has my permission to release my e-mail address to you. Keep in mind, though, that on this site, honesty and forthrightness is usually appreciated and defended. We are interested in understanding… well most of us are. Ryan O., the two Jeffs and Roman M. have been VERY non-ideological and empirical… and polite. Steve M. bends himself into knots to keep his blog focused on science and not personalities or ideologies. As this thread demonstrates, even where he he himself may have a grievance there are enough people who will research the issue and let him know if the problem is “innocent” or not. Please, be a regular here.

It is indeed true that Steve made no assumptions as to why his site was blocked at Sudbury. That’s what his fan club is for. I suspect that there are a lot of other sites blocked at Sudbury and in China that are inoffensive in any way and precious little to do with climate.

I have great respect for people who challenge the status quo but very little for those who use cherry picked data to fit their agenda.

I also notice that sea ice extent is dipping from its 30-year norm yet again.

I am a representative of the Greater Sudbury Airport and this blog was brought to my attention. I simply wanted to address the issue regarding the Climate Audit website being blocked from the Public PCs at our airport.

The blocking of this site was not performed intentionally. One of the two public PC’s in the airport terminal contained a blocking software program that we were not aware of and as a result, certain sites were being blocked.

We have a found a solution to the issue and will be performing changes shortly.

I truly hope that your next pass through our airport is a pleasant one!

thanks for the reply. Can you provide particulars on how the block was created – in case the situation arises on another occasion elsewhere? And could you describe the solution and the changes. Thanks.

The internet on the PCs was being provided by an outside internet company that was somehow allowing passengers to download software programs onto the PC.

Both PC’s are actually being replaced the internet will now be provided by the City of Greater Sudbury. Their network is completely secure and will not allow any software programs to be downloaded in the future.

We are confident this is a good solution and will prevent any situation such as this from occurring in the future. Thank you.

Terra, I’m glad to learn that the airport itself didn’t block the site, but could you clarify things further.

I’m still puzzled as to the mechanics of the block even on the basis that the software installation was unauthorized.

The software company Softforyou says that climateaudit.org was not on their blocked list and yet access was blogged – which would seem to contradict the statement of the software company. Can you shed any light on this?

Rather than searching the site and editing posts manually, have you considered just running sql statements to replace the offending text?

I think you use MySql, which I don’t know the exact syntax, nor the structure of the db, but assuming comments were in a table called comments, in a field called commenttext, sql server would support a statment like

UPDATE Comments
SET CommentTExt = REPLACE(CommentText, xxx, yyy)

xxx is the text you are looking for
yyy is the text you want to replace xxx with

If you have full-text indexing on, you can add a WHERE CONTAINS type clause as well.

If someone uses MySql, maybe you can translate to the appropriate syntax.

That would seem much easier than manually editing comments. Also, you could filter for all words and put the sql into a scheduled job that would run once a day, replacing banned words with whatever you wanted.

Steve, I can not provide further details on the mechanics of the problem. We do not have an IT staff on site and my knowledge of this technology is quite limited. As mentioned, the internet on those PC’s was being provided by an outside agency.

There was no security risk to our systems as these computers are not connected to our network, their sole purpose is to allow passengers to have internet access while waiting for flights.

If you would like further information, please email me at terra.glabb@greatersudbury.ca and I can put you in contact with someone who can provide details.

BTW, we found the bug that was getting to my passwords on my PC this week and it was quite clever. It gathered through the brown dog that Windows XP uses as part of their childish visual help. Doggone now.